Writing His Way Into History

Tenured more than 20 years ago, CSUN English professor Anthony Arthur doesn’t have to worry about job security. He is free of the obligation to publish articles of little interest outside the academy--his page turner of a journal article on Anthony Trollope and the art of narrative leaps to mind.

But like most good scholars, Arthur wrote not only because his academic survival depended on it but because a person steeped in the artful use of language always wonders if he too has the gift.

“I’ve read a lot of books, and I wanted to see if I could write one,” says Arthur, who has produced three books of historical nonfiction since 1985.

Recently released in paperback, Arthur’s latest is a stranger-than-fiction account of the reign of a David Koresh-like religious leader in 16th century Germany.

Called “The Tailor-King,” the book tells the unlikely story of how, for more than a year, the north German city of Munster was transformed into a murderous theocracy, where men took as many wives as they could get their hands on, private property was abolished and no one was allowed to shut his or her front door.

Published by St. Martin’s, the book is the story of the rise and fall of a splinter group of Anabaptists, a sect that broke with the Lutheran Church over the prohibition against the re-baptizing of adults, among other theological differences. Most Anabaptists were members of a nonviolent minority persecuted by other Protestants, as well as Catholics--today’s Mennonites share many of their beliefs.

But the Munster rebels were the stuff that racy historical novels are made of, historical novels like Mika Waltari’s “The Egyptian” that Arthur loved as a kid.

Under the spell of their charismatic leader, Jan van Leyden, the Anabaptists of Munster turned over most of their worldly goods and stood helplessly by as Van Leyden executed anyone who crossed him, including a favorite wife who dared to criticize his reign of terror. Behind the walls and double moat of their city, they also kept a well-equipped army at bay for 16 months, as courageous during the long, hungry siege as the citizens of Stalingrad would be when they faced the Nazis 400 years later.

Arthur tries to bring a novelist’s sensibility to the story he tells, aware that a 16th century religious revolt won’t automatically appeal to a modern American audience.

“If I could, I would dearly love to write great novels, but I don’t feel I have that talent,” says the 64-year-old Arthur, who lives in Woodland Hills with his wife, Carolyn. “I’ve felt that I could never invent anything as interesting as what I find.”

He found the subject for his first book of popular history, “Deliverance at Los Banos,” in the Los Angeles Times. There he saw a short article about a reunion in Anaheim of the survivors of a brutal Japanese internment camp in the Philippines and the American paratroopers and Filipino guerrillas who rescued them in 1945. He went to the event, interviewed some of the attendees and realized there was a book in it.

Arthur’s account of the rescue was chosen as a History Book Club selection and glowingly reviewed by historian Stephen Ambrose.

Arthur became interested in medieval Germany while reading William Manchester’s popular history of the waning years of the Dark Ages, “A World Lit Only by Fire,” a book some called salacious.

Starting on the journey from book to book that is one of the joys of research, Arthur next consulted Norman Cohn’s “The Pursuit of the Millennium,” a study of revolutionary millenarians of the Middle Ages, including Jan van Leyden.

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Work on the book took Arthur to Munster, where he found extensive archival material on King Jan. Although it was in German, Arthur had brushed up his graduate-school German enough to read the documents (a former Army linguist, Arthur was once fluent in Korean, as well). In Munster he also found such artifacts of Van Leyden’s doomed kingdom as the iron cage in which the tailor-king’s body was displayed after his execution. The cage still hangs from the top of St. Lambert’s Church.

Conflict is the force that propels narrative, and “The Tailor-King” is rife with it. Conflict is also central to Arthur’s very different current project, a book on literary feuds. One of the obvious attractions of writing about such dueling authors as Truman Capote and Gore Vidal is that writers insult each other more pungently than the less articulate. Arthur was surprised to discover that earlier books on the subject were out of print.

The new book, which he hopes to deliver to St. Martin’s later this year, is less research-intensive than his last one, although it will include material on the lives and work of John Updike and Tom Wolfe and other contentious pairs of writers. “I’m trying to keep it from just being gossip,” Arthur says. His aim is “fun first, but an elevated sort of fun.”

Repeatedly emerging in his research is evidence of just how mean a feuding writer can be. Vidal continued to insult Capote even after the latter’s death. Indeed Arthur could easily title his still-unnamed book “Gifted People Acting Badly.”

Does he have a favorite insult among all those exchanged by his battling authors? Yes, he says. The Golden Nasty goes to Mary McCarthy, who, in impugning the veracity of rival Lillian Hellman, declared: “Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.”

Spotlight appears every Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at valley.news@latimes.com.